Prose Style: Essays on Tools & Technique
Including a brief statement of each essay's subject matter
At the end, I include posts from others.
My Prose Style Series
Aping the Style of Classic Authors — The style of Ernest Hemingway, including parataxis and cumulative sentences.
How Herman Melville Wrote Blood Meridian — A look at the style of Cormac McCarthy through his literary influences; introduces polysyndeton.
To Hell with William Faulkner — A general introduction to the study of prose style.
Learning from the Best of the Worst — Countering bad writing and purple prose with examples from The Eye of Argon by Jim Theis.
A Philosophy of Style — Exploring the reason for style through Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov (published on another of my newsletters)
A New Classic Resembles No Classic Which Came Before — The history of twentieth century prose seen as a conflict between Twain / Hemingway and Melville / Faulkner, culminating in Cormac McCarthy.
Twilight by Famous Authors — Exercises in rewriting a paragraph in the styles of classic writers.
Your Literary Foundation for Literary Style — Introduces minimalism and maximalism.
The Devil Writes Fiction — Modernism, postmodernism, and metamodernism.
A Word Like a Butterfly, Pinned — Phonetics and asyndeton.
The Secret of Literary Style — What makes a style literary or not and a suggested term for non-literary prose.
Prose Style: Specificity and Proto-Germanic Word Origins — Self explanatory, this one.
Borrow, Steal, Invent: How a Personal Prose Style Can Become a Literary Movement — Again, self explanatory, but in the footnotes I cover mutually exclusive rules
Word Order and Reclaiming Passive Voice -- A return to the concept of flow.
Undressing Figures of Speech — a introduction to creating a turn of phrase.
Can’t decide where to begin? Allow me to suggest:
Posts From Others Around Substack
From
, this pose encourages a return to forgotten punctuation, and I love the idea. I’ll be studying this post so I can apply its lessons to my current short story.
From
, this digs into what I refer to as minmalism and maximalism.
Glad you posted the list of essays in order. I want to have them to refer to. If you'd rather I not copy them, (I swear I won't share the contents of your book before its published) let me know. Okay. I'm a nosy Parker. I want to see the chapter flow ....do you list them in any particular order?